People inside WWE were surprised by the way The Rock praised AEW in his tribute to PAC, according to Dave Meltzer.
Speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Meltzer said the issue was not that Dwayne Johnson made the video, but how he described WWE’s main competitor while sitting on the board of WWE’s parent company, TKO Group Holdings.
“Rock and Nick Khan are close. I do not believe that has changed. Were there people in WWE who were very surprised at his wording and what he said, especially with him being on the TKO board of directors? Yes, okay. They were very surprised,” Meltzer said. “Nick may not have been. He may have told Nick ahead of time. Maybe he didn’t. He can do whatever he wants.”
“Not that he did the video, but the wording in the video, where he praised them and essentially gave the stamp of, ‘Yeah, you guys are good for business and work hard, and you’re helping make wrestling,'” he said. “That’s not the message I think the company wants out. No one’s going to be mad at him doing the video, but the wording, people brought it up to me.”
Johnson posted the video to Instagram on September 29, two days after PAC, whose real name was Benjamin Satterley, died at the age of 40. He extended condolences to Satterley’s family, Tony Khan, QT Marshall, the AEW locker room and the WWE personnel who knew him.
“As global as professional wrestling is, as global as WWE is, as much as AEW is growing into this phenomenal wrestling company, and wherever you’re wrestling at around the world, we’re still a very tight knit unit and a tight knit group because we all share the same DNA,” Johnson said in the video.
That wording stands apart from how WWE itself handled the death. The company opened the September 28 edition of Raw with a memorial graphic and posted a statement on X that read, “WWE extends its condolences to the family, friends and fans of Benjamin Satterley, known to the WWE Universe as Neville.” Triple H posted his own tribute the same morning, recalling Satterley’s role in the early days of NXT. Neither mentioned AEW or Khan by name. Johnson’s video named both.
Johnson joined the TKO board of directors in January 2024, in the same agreement that gave him full ownership of “The Rock” trademark. The deal also included a $30 million restricted stock award, and SEC filings showed him holding 289,673 TKO shares as of January 2025, worth more than $41 million at the time, with further shares vesting through the end of 2025. He has not appeared on WWE programming since Elimination Chamber in March 2025. Satterley wrestled for WWE as Neville from 2012 to 2018 and signed with AEW in 2019.
Analysis
I don’t think there is anything to read into what The Rock said. Neville was beloved across wrestling, and his death touched a lot of people. The Rock wanted to say something, and he said it the way he wanted to.
Some people are speculating that The Rock and Tony Khan will do business together one day. Never say never in wrestling, and The Rock is going to do what The Rock wants to do. But he owns tens of millions of dollars in TKO stock and sits on its board. As long as that is the case, I can’t see him working with AEW beyond maybe a surprise appearance. He is in his 50s. What would he get out of it?
What he can do is say whatever he wants. Plenty of people in WWE won’t praise Tony Khan because it’s where they work and they might be afraid to speak up. The Rock doesn’t have that problem. So I understand why people in WWE were surprised, and I understand why some of them weren’t happy.
WWE’s animosity toward AEW isn’t a secret. WWE ran NXT on Wednesday nights against Dynamite from 2019 to 2021. This summer, NXT’s Great American Bash ran against Forbidden Door on June 28, NXT Heatwave ran against All In on August 30, and on September 26 WWE put Worlds Collide at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont at 8 p.m. ET, the same night, the same start time and 20 minutes away from All Out at the NOW Arena in Hoffman Estates. WWE announced it ten days after AEW announced All Out. Tony Khan called that scheduling “predatory” on the Battleground Podcast.
